Due to the empirical success of reinforcement learning, an increasing number
of students study the subject. However, from our practical teaching experience,
we see students entering the field (bachelor, master and early PhD) often
struggle. On the one hand, textbooks and (online) lectures provide the
fundamentals, but students find it hard to translate between equations and
code. On the other hand, public codebases do provide practical examples, but
the implemented algorithms tend to be complex, and the underlying test
environments contain multiple reinforcement learning challenges at once.
Although this is realistic from a research perspective, it often hinders
educational conceptual understanding. To solve this issue we introduce EduGym,
a set of educational reinforcement learning environments and associated
interactive notebooks tailored for education. Each EduGym environment is
specifically designed to illustrate a certain aspect/challenge of reinforcement
learning (e.g., exploration, partial observability, stochasticity, etc.), while
the associated interactive notebook explains the challenge and its possible
solution approaches, connecting equations and code in a single document. An
evaluation among RL students and researchers shows 86% of them think EduGym is
a useful tool for reinforcement learning education. All notebooks are available
from this https URL, while the full software
package can be installed from this https URL

通过 EduGym 这一套教育性的强化学习环境和配套的交互式笔记本，该研究旨在帮助学生更好地理解强化学习的概念和实践，通过提供特定挑战方面的环境和解决方案，从而提高教学效果。